Day 10 25th October.
Jonathan went to the workshop to help
with the ring beam, but as there was very little us poor, weak women
could do, we walked into town from Milimani, and booked the Guardian
bus for Nairobi for when we leave here on the 6th. Ksh
1,300 each, which is about £10 for a seven hour bus journey, or
about 250 miles. Not bad !
Its strange walking into town and
seeing how much it has changed since I lived here. We pass the old
Imperial Hotel (renamed Kisumu Hotel in about 1970 soon after we came
here … to get rid of the colonial name), and I remember the
enormous lunches we used to eat there …. seven courses for under £1
in those days …. and the men usually attempted all seven courses ! When I returned here about 18 years ago with Suzie and Tim, there
were curio sellers all along the road opposite the hotel; they are
now gone and there is a multi-storied building going up.
The Nakumatt shopping mall in the centre of town
On the corner as you turn into the main
road (Oginga Odinga Road, named after the famous post colonial Luo
politician) there is a bank in a building which was once Eddie
Pereira's restaurant. The morning of the day I gave birth to #1
daughter, we went there for breakfast as the sisters at the Victoria
hospital where I had checked in, told me I had several hours to go ….
so I ate a hearty meal to prepare for the ordeal ahead ! Eldest
daughter Liz was born that evening, thus earning the Luo name
'Atieno' …. meaning 'born in the evening'.
Further down the main road, we passed
what was once the cinema; it is now a tabernacle. We saw one of the
Star Wars movies there !! What a flea pit it was then, and it
doesn't appear to have improved over the years.
Then we went to the bank for Wendy to
draw out some money. It was quite quick for Wendy to get her
money; only 40 minutes to withdraw Kenya shillings to the value of
£70 …. the maximum allowed. It came as a huge stack of notes, which the bank teller put into a brown envelope for Wendy, but she couldn't get it into her bag, so as I had trousers, I managed to get it into my pocket, but could hardly bend with it there !!
The bank brought back memories too of
long gone friends we sometimes bumped into in the bank … Judy
Blencoe, a nursing sister at what we called the Russian hospital, who
was a keen bird watcher and who sold us her four volume copies of
Birds of the Belgian Congo; and Tim Valentine, who was a great
organist and was sadly killed in a car crash near Kericho; later we
took on his dog, Mengo. Ghosts of my past still walk the streets
of Kisumu …....
** Writing now in 2018, I need to correct the above: I heard today from David W. in Thailand (20th March, 2018) that Tim Valentine actually died in an awful car accident at Mtito Andei in 1969/70, on his way to meet David and Pat W. in Malindi. They were going to visit Lamu together. Apparently (David writes) "there had been an earlier car accident near Kericho (Renault 4 also turned over on this occasion, so I seem to remember hearing), Tim had walked away uninjured."
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Walking back to Mill Hill, we passed this piece of advertising on a building .... not sure if I'd recommend such paint if it looked like that !
In the evening, there was a spectacular sunset over the gulf of Lake Victoria, which we can just see from the house at the bottom of the road opposite.
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